A translation of the Old Testament Psalms reflecting changes
in the concept of God

With the coming of Christ, the message to the Jewish people, and the rest of
the world, changed from describing a god of vengeance and revenge, judgment and
damnation to picture the concept that love from person to person and from
persons to their idea of god would cause a greater good in the ever closer
cultures. As we learn that war is not the way to settle disputes, that killing
only hurts, that anger and fear harm the hater and the hated, it seems love is
the greatest good that we know. Therefore, lacking anything better to describe
the mystery and majesty of the Divine Force that wills and works the Universe,
and not knowing what greater emotion we can offer to this silence, we offer up
our love – pitiful as it may seem at times. Yet it is better, cleaner,
brighter than our fears and our cowardly submission to a frightening and easily
angered imaginary authority figure. As we come to believe that not only is God
our greatest Mystery and Mover of the Creation, we also believe that a Spark of
that same Force is within ourselves. Thus, in order to reach out to touch the
Greatest we have to be accepting of its position of also residing within each of
us. As hard as this may be to believe, especially when we have been taught to
hate our bodies, or our selves, or our emotions or our feelings or our desires,
the message of love, as taught by Christ, is exactly that! That we shall love
ourselves, our neighbors, our planet and in this manner be able to touch the God
Spirit within each of us is a teaching that is slowly gaining credence across
the boundaries of the various religions of the world.

As beautiful as the Psalms of the Old Testament are, the refrain of nearly
every song is the idea that the God of the Israelites will not only protect them
from their enemies, but they actually pray that their god will destroy the
persons they hate. Personally, I could not repeat such words in my daily
devotions. So, with prayers and supplications to the best within myself, I have
transposed these marvelous poems, back into their old genre of parallelism with
the thinking as revealed by Christ.

If we take the words of Christ, that "God is Love" then could we
not refer to this Unknowable entity as our Beloved? This is nothing new. In the
original Hebrew the word for God was often "Adonia" (related to the
Greek god Adonis from which English takes the term 'adored'). So even at the
time the Psalms were written, God was seen the object of the writer's love.

In the oldest ghazals, the Persian poets constantly moved between the love
from person to person and from person to god so that in many of their poems one
cannot be sure to which relationship the phrases refer. For these reasons, I
felt comfortable in testing out the word "Beloved" substituted for God
or "the Lord he" in the Psalms. With this change it seemed the songs
were more comforting to me, easier to grasp and understand, but most of all,
they were easier for me to feel. Out of this closeness came new understanding
and appreciation of the marvelousness of these old songs.

I see the Psalms as rituals for feeding the spiritual aspects of life with my
own blessedness. In addition, the words and precepts have become an instruction
and comfort in the times of darkness or insecurity. May all beings know
Compassion. Blessed be!

Dedication

This work is the result of the witness by the monks at the
Christ in the Desert Monastery, in Abiguiu, New Mexico, during my visit there in
2000. The teachings of Saint Benedict in his book of Rules set my feet on
this path of beauty and joy.